Flash: Science Says Conservatives Are Crazy and/or Stupid.

One of the more depressing aspects of the age in which we live is the prostitution of what is called Science for political ends, by people who claim to be scientists. The pursuit of truth is a noble endeavor. At its best that is precisely what Science is. Too often currently what is called Science is politicized junk with a clear agenda at its core. Andrew Ferguson in The Weekly Standard examines this phenomenon in regard to the attempt by liberal academics to claim that those holding conservative political views are irrational, selfish or just plain stupid.

Earlier generations of leftists knew the power of Science to discredit their political opponents. Most famously, in the years following World War II, Theodor Adorno and his fellow sociologists developed the F scale—“F” for fascism—to identify the “authoritarian personality” that so often gave rise to political and cultural conservatism. They discovered that conservatives suffered (unconsciously!) from “prefascist tendencies” like “intolerance of ambiguity” and “moral rigidity.” They acquired this scientific knowledge by reading questionnaires filled out by 180 respondents during the last year of World War II. Among the respondents were Rotarians, patients at mental hospitals, San Quentin inmates, students at the University of California, and members of the Lion’s Club.

You don’t hear much about Adorno anymore. As a political figure he was too extreme, and as a social scientist he was too transparently political, to remain in good repute with scientists who have persuaded themselves that they have no ideology. In time it became clear that in pretending to plumb the authoritarian personality, Adorno and his “investigators had arrived at their conclusions in advance” through a “set of self-validating procedures,” as the great sociologist Christopher Lasch put it.

Our generation of Democrats, in and out of the press, have now rediscovered Adorno’s methods, and put them to the same purpose. Edsall himself has become a booster of a series of “studies” that together form, in his words, “an extensive academic critique of the right.” The studies are boring, which is why the few people who bother to look them up rarely get beyond the one-paragraph summary. But they’re worth studying for an insight into the way Adorno’s heirs, our own psychopundits, continue his work.

The studies rely on the principle that has informed the social sciences for more than a generation: If a researcher with a Ph.D. can corral enough undergraduates into a campus classroom and, by giving them a little bit of money or a class credit, get them to do something—fill out a questionnaire, let’s say, or pretend they’re in a specific real-world situation that the researcher has thought up—the young scholars will (unconsciously!) yield general truths about the human animal; scientific truths. The scientific truths revealed in Edsall’s “academic critique of the right” demonstrate that “the rich and powerful” lack compassion, underestimate the suffering of others, have little sympathy for the disadvantaged, and are far more willing to act unethically than the less rich and not so powerful.

How do we know this? A paper called “Power, Distress, and Compassion: Turning a Blind Eye to the Suffering of Others” describes a study put together by a team of social psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley, a few years ago. Graduate assistants managed to collect 118 undergraduates, most of them under the age of 21. The kids agreed to participate in the experiment because they were given $15 or class credit for a psychology requirement. A skeptic might point out that the sample of participants was thus skewed from the start, unnaturally weighted toward either kids who badly need $15 or psych majors. And all of them, by definition, were the kinds of kids who want to go to college at Berkeley. Almost half of the participants were Asian American; only 3.5 percent were African American. Caucasians made up less than 30 percent.

Go here to read the brilliant rest. In the old Soviet Union, dissidents were often confined in mental hospitals, since obviously someone had to be crazy to oppose the glorious Worker’s Paradise. Liberals in this country lack that type of power, but it should give us all an uneasy feeling to realize that there are more than a few people on the port side of the politics in this nation who think that those opposing them politically may have, by definition, a few screws loose. This review of the unintentionally hilarious book The Republican Brain is instructive on that score:

Art: When I am not reading The American Catholic, I may be reading several economics profs’ blogs. Thus, I am qualified to trash economists.

Case in point, In 2006 one famous econ prof blogger was asked if it was a good time to buy a house. Effectively his answer was, “Have at it. What could happen?”
And, none of them know why (PS: Dodd-Frank doesn’t solve it, either) we are where we are today.

They are blinded by ideology: wealth and income redistribution; failed Keynesian (Keynes was at a meeting of economists and quipped I am the only one here who is not a Keynesian) stimuli. and the commenters – OY!

They keep trotting out this communism-lite stuff that never works. Here is what Keynes, effectively, said about that (communist socialism), ” . . .Future economists and historians will marvel at how a concept so dull and illogical could have exercised such force on so many . . .”

Mary,

I am sorry. My opinion: theology is the study of stuff made up about God. Similarly, philosophy is the art of making up stuff about stuff.

T. Shaw: “I am sorry. My opinion: theology is the study of stuff made up about God. Similarly, philosophy is the art of making up stuff about stuff.
I know. I am a Phillistine”
Definitions I had not heard before. and no, you are definitely not a Phillistine.